My office and my home are 400 km apart. Consequently, I’m either on the road for a long time or away from home for several days. It would be cool, of course, if I could still game as usual. I do have a Nintendo Switch, but my main games don’t run on it.
An alternative would be a gaming laptop. But those are expensive and heavy. I already have my work laptop with me, a second one would just be annoying. Then there’s the Steam Deck from Valve. The build quality is great, and the price is okay when it’s on sale. But it’s based entirely on Linux and is relatively weak. This means many games are simply out of the question or run very slowly.
But the Steam Deck at least showed that there’s a market for handhelds with PC hardware. Asus recognized this and built their own handheld. In doing so, they tried to improve upon the Steam Deck and failed miserably. The doubled performance is great and a step forward, but it comes at a heavy cost to battery life. Windows instead of Linux allows for more games, but the user interface is a complete mess. Prioritizing gaming is good, but the casing is an absolute joke.
But let’s start from the beginning: The ROG Ally runs at a higher resolution and with an SoC that’s twice as powerful as the Steam Deck’s. In theory, this allows for better image quality or more FPS. After a few driver updates, this seems to work well now. But more FPS or more pixels also require more power. With the same size, Asus can barely fit more battery into the case than Valve, so the battery life is significantly shorter. For me, that’s manageable; there’s usually a power outlet nearby on the train. The main thing is that I can hold and operate the device comfortably.
Ah, operation. It comes with Windows 11 installed, which offers virtually no options for small handheld touchscreens. Asus’s own software, which is supposed to solve this problem, unfortunately doesn’t do a good job either. I held the ROG Ally in my hands at Media Markt and I have to say, the Asus software is garbage; I’d end up using Steam Big Picture mode. But even worse is the casing. The shape is extremely geared towards gaming, which is still acceptable to me. The back buttons aren’t optimal, but they’re okay. But what product developer came up with the idea of combining an angular design with rough plastic and a white color? I quickly put the demo unit at Media Markt back down and disinfected my hands. There were brown stains all over it, grime from the hands of many people. And thanks to the surface, it’s probably extremely difficult to clean. And of course, lots of RGB effects. The device felt like a cheap plastic piece of junk, like a souvenir from a street vendor in Italy.
At that point, the device was pretty much dead to me. Still, you know how it is, you think about it and have second thoughts. In the end, though, the decision was made easy for me: Asus didn’t consider that SD cards and SD card readers are sensitive to heat and placed the ventilation right next to the SD slot. Great idea to blow 95°C hot air directly onto the SD slot. That was sarcasm. Shortly after release, it became clear that this destroys SD cards and sometimes the entire slot. Since it’s a design flaw, there’s no good solution here. Asus increased the fan speed to make the air cooler. In return, the device is now louder and consumes more power. A hardware flaw that can be mitigated with software, but not solved.
A shame for me, as I currently can’t play Destiny 2 when I’m not at home. The Steam Deck is good, but a bit too weak and only optimized for Linux. Maybe a Steam Deck 2 will come out soon - that might be an option. But the Asus ROG Ally is unfortunately a flop that should never have been released.